Tuesday, July 10, 2007

iPhone, Google gears and Mobisy

Last few weeks have been sort of turning point for Mobile Internet.

iPhone is phenomenal for us in Mobile Industry. I feel it would be awesome for consumers as well.
You may have already heard the hype
1.iPhone means tail wagging the dog
2.it means a completely new era in Mobile industry,
3.It is special since it's a laptop convergence device running a full OS X
All of above is true but from our point of view the biggest impact iPhone will have on mobile industry will be as an internet device running a full web browser. A first mobile phone vendor which dares 3rd party developers to develop applications 'only' based on their Safari browser.
“Safari” is the key. BTW like many other innovations in iPhone, iPhone is not the first device running full Safari browser on a mobile device. Nokia has been doing it for more than a year now, what's more they have even open sourced their Symbian port. Steve Jobs declaration in Apple WWDC really changes the rules of the game. To give you an idea, we in Mobile Industry struggled with following application development environments till now

1.Native (Symbian, Microsoft Pocket PC, BREW etc) :- These are extremely powerful in terms of technology but completely un-portable across devices and operating systems
2.Java/J2ME :- This is moderately powerful and moderately portable.
3.Flashlite :- A new entrant in the area and a good competitor for J2ME in games development area.
4.Micro browser based :- These have very limited functionality but are portable provided you do not use any AJAX/ Web 2.0 technologies.

iPhone promises that today we can develop all the AJAX applications we want with the hope that tomorrow Apple will make the browser based environment more powerful by giving it device access.

This brings me to second life changing event in Mobile internet area, advent of Google Gears. Google gears basically enhances your PC browser environment by enabling developers to give cool features like off-line access to application data. And bringing this development to Mobile phones has excited many analysts in the world as you can see here and here. I feel it's only matter of time.

I still haven't talked about how does it all affects Mobisy, I mean why the hell am I ranting about it?
Hmm.. if you don't know us probably you may not know, we started talking about Mobisy with a vision of reinventing Mobile Internet around an year ago. Our whole idea is of a scripting based fully customizable and personalized simple User Interface platform for Mobile Phones(Mobile Easy). No wonder the product we are working on is also in the same area !!! iPhone and Google gear validate our concept today. And that's why we take this opportunity to talk about our product publicly. Not to mention, it also saves us some effort of explaining basics ..:-)
We are working on a product which complements the visions of Apple, Nokia , Google to the core. We are building an application development platform for mobile phones which will enable developers to develop internet applications with capabilities of a native environment with off-line access!! Sounds impossible? Not quite.. We already have some private demos and proof of concepts working, so watch this space for more details in future.. If you can't wait to know more, feel free to drop me a line.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

very very cool.
would love to see a poc.
may the force be with you.

Anonymous said...

great job folks..

Awanish said...

Sounds interesting...
I have two questions:
1. how do you position yourself in the market when you know that there are many big names already present and giving a tough fight to each other?

2. As per my understanding, developing a mobile application development framework takes considerable amount of time and effort (correct me if I am wrong), then have you already thought about the market condition prevailing when you are ready for launch? (forget it if the question sounds messy)

Lalit said...

Hi Awanish,
Thanks a lot for your comment. You do make valid points, let me answer them one by one.
1. Yes there are bigger names in the market, which for us means that there is big market out there. And about the competition, we know we have really unique technology with us with which we will differentiate with our competitors. Also there is the fact that our platform can host both Google and Yahoo applications which their internal competition may prevent.

2.Time to market etc .. hmmm... We have already completed key aspects of our platform which does give us time advantage over others. And we are carefully looking at the time when we launch to make sure that the market conditions are right at that time ..:-)
Again thanks a lot for your interest, do get in touch with on my e-mail id lalit at mobisy dot com for further discussion.
Look forward to hear from you,
Lalit.

Awanish said...

wish you all the best!

Anonymous said...

"BTW like many other innovations in iPhone, iPhone is not the first device running full Safari browser on a mobile device. Nokia has been doing it for more than a year now, what's more they have even open sourced their Symbian port. "

Stopped reading right there. You don't know what you're talking about. Nokia devices are running a completely different browser based on WEBKIT, NOT SAFARI. They share a common rendering engine (which is turn is based on KDE's rendering engine), but to say that Nokia has ported Safari to their phones and open sourced it is grossly inaccurate. Firefox and KMeleon share the gecko rendering engine, but it would be pretty stupid to say that they are the same browser, as is the case here.

Oh, and webkit was already open source, which is the reason why Nokia decided to use it.

Lalit said...

Dear Anonymous,
Would have preferred if you would have put your contact details. All the same, yes you are right Nokia is not using Safari but open source Webkit before Apple did it, I had put "Safari" for the understanding of common folks who do not know or care about as many details as you do. Next time if you do have opinions pls care to put your contact so that we can have meaningful discussion.
Cheers,
Lalit

Anonymous said...

iis46h Your blog is great. Articles is interesting!

Anonymous said...

Wonderful blog.

Ranjini said...

Great !! Would love to see it.
All the best

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